As the longer history of murders of trans women and cis-men in and around the Church-Wellesley village, many of whom were people of colour, hits the mainstream news, these questions once again arise: Whose lives are worth missing? Whose disappearances from spaces imagined as gay or LGBT are worth reporting and investigating? How are notions of innocence and violence, and horizons of redress and transformation, complicated when the perpetrator is both a gay man associated with the degenerate/regenerating urban space of the “gay village,” and a white cis-man whom dominant voices in the village, and to some extent the media and police, register as “one of us”? And how do our activist scholarly practices of archiving, curating and programming serve to unmap or reinscribe these practices?

This talk draws on the work of the Marvellous Grounds collective (Choi ed 2017, Haritaworn, Moussa, Ware and Rodriguez forthcoming, Haritaworn, Moussa and Ware forthcoming, Kaur Panag and Rodriguez eds 2016), a queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour mapping and archiving project coming out of York University. In this archive, the successful territorialization of the “gay village” becomes apparent as an effect of a carceral city that is not only neoliberal, but also racial and colonial, and that treats low-income trans women of colour in particular as excessive. To queer urban justice in a lethal environment that is fluent in the languages of diversity, and to prefigure futures that go beyond these murderous inclusions, means to remember differently, and to step into the unfinished legacies of those who are rarely missed, and whose removal has been constitutive of urban and academic spaces designated “gay,” “LGBT” and, increasingly, “trans”.

Jin Haritaworn is Associate Professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University. Their publications include two books, numerous articles (in journals such as GLQ and Society&Space), and several co/edited collections (including Queer Necropolitics and Queering Urban Justice). Their book, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places (Pluto 2015), on queer Berlin, addresses both academic and non-academic readerships interested in queer of colour spaces and communities. Jin has keynoted in several fields on both sides of the Atlantic, including gender, sexuality and transgender studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and urban studies, and has made foundational contributions to various debates, including on gay imperialism, homonationalism, queer gentrification and criminalization, and trans and queer of colour space.

This event is part of the TRANS MATTERS Interdisciplinary Trans Studies Graduate Student Conference, organized by the Centre for Feminist Research.